How Nicaragua's 2025 constitutional reform allowed Ortega to cancel elections

Daniel Ortega’s July 20, 2026 declaration that Nicaragua would have elections “never again” sounded, at first hearing, like a break with constitutional government. Reuters reported that Ortega said the government would work with the National Assembly on laws “building a wall” against future elections, while the precise implementing legislation remained unspecified at the time of the announcement.[1] For a legal analysis of Ortega’s cancellation of elections, however, the more important date is not July 2026. It is January 2025.

By then, the Nicaraguan constitutional order had already been rewritten in a way that made the abolition of competitive electoral democracy legally continuous with the amended text. The cancellation did not need to arrive as an obviously extra-constitutional seizure. The machinery had been moved earlier: the amendment rule, the distribution of state powers, the appointment rules for courts and the electoral authority, and the internal constitutional bridge to international human rights law.

The procedural move came first

The 2025 reform amended 148 of Nicaragua’s 198 constitutional articles and eliminated 37 entirely, according to Verfassungsblog’s article-level account of the reform.[2] That scale matters, but the legal form matters more. The reform was treated as a partial constitutional reform under Article 193, a route that required a 56% supermajority in the National Assembly — 70 of 128 votes — rather than a constituent assembly or referendum.[2]

That procedural choice converted a transformation of the constitutional system into an amendatory act that the Ortega-aligned legislature could pass. JURIST reported in February 2025 that Nicaragua’s legislature ratified reforms granting the president control over all state branches, confirming that the reform had moved through the legislative process rather than through a popular constituent procedure.[3]

The point is not that procedure sanitizes the result. It is that procedure helps explain why the later election cancellation could be presented as lawmaking inside the system rather than a suspension of the system. Article 193 supplied the formal channel. The supermajority supplied the votes. The avoided referendum or constituent assembly supplied the absence: no external moment at which the polity had to approve the constitutional replacement.

A caveat is necessary. The article numbering used here follows the secondary constitutional analyses cited here, especially Verfassungsblog and ConstitutionNet. Where the amended primary text is not independently reproduced in those sources, the legal diagnosis should be read with that source hierarchy in mind.

Elections cannot survive the loss of the institutions that make them elections

The decisive clause is Article 132. Verfassungsblog describes it as giving the presidency authority to “coordinate” the legislative, judicial, electoral, and citizen-participation branches.[2] In ordinary constitutional drafting, coordination can sound administrative. In this setting, it is structural. If the executive coordinates the legislature, the courts, the electoral branch, and the citizen-participation branch, then the offices that must be capable of saying no to the executive are placed within the executive’s constitutional orbit.

That is why the July 2026 announcement should not be treated as a stand-alone electoral event. The relevant legal predicate had already changed. An election requires more than a voting day. It requires an electoral authority able to administer the contest independently, courts able to adjudicate disputes without executive direction, a legislature not reduced to an implementation arm, and rights that opposition candidates and voters can invoke against the state. Article 132 attacked that architecture at the level of constitutional allocation.

Article 136 then made the institutional dependency more concrete. The reform gave the executive appointment authority over Supreme Court justices and members of the Supreme Electoral Council, according to the same account.[2] Once the executive controls the appointments to both the highest court and the electoral body, the legal system still has institutions with official names, terms, chambers, and procedures. What it lacks is the independence that makes those institutions capable of checking the executive project.

This is where a purely chronological account misleads. If one begins with July 20, 2026, the immediate question becomes whether Ortega can abolish elections. If one begins with Article 132 and Article 136, the question changes: who, after January 2025, remained constitutionally positioned to stop him? The answer is much narrower. The electoral body was no longer an independent counterweight. The judiciary was no longer an independent final arbiter. The legislature had already demonstrated that the partial-reform route could carry a constitutional transformation.

The removed human-rights bridge matters

The removal of Article 46 is not a side issue. Verfassungsblog identifies Article 46 as the provision that had linked Nicaragua’s constitutional order to instruments including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights.[2] Removing that bridge did not erase Nicaragua’s international obligations as a matter of international law. It did, however, narrow the domestic constitutional pathway through which those instruments could be invoked inside Nicaragua’s own legal order.

For election law, that distinction is not academic. International human rights instruments protect participation, association, expression, due process, nationality, and effective remedies — the rights that give electoral competition legal content. If the constitution no longer incorporates that external rights vocabulary in the same way, domestic litigants lose one of the textual hooks that courts, administrative bodies, and lawyers could use against exclusionary election rules.

The loss is sharper because the courts themselves were placed within the new appointment structure. A right that cannot be invoked domestically is weaker. A right that must be invoked before judges whose appointment depends on the executive is weaker still. The 2025 reform worked on both sides of the legal equation: it reduced the available rights bridge and altered the institutions that would have heard the claim.

The supporting clauses completed the same design

Article 133 created an automatic co-presidency that elevated Rosario Murillo to equal executive authority without election, according to Verfassungsblog.[2] That clause is often described in dynastic terms, and understandably so. Its narrower constitutional significance is that executive authority was not merely centralized in an office; it was reorganized around a paired executive arrangement that did not depend on a separate electoral mandate for the co-president.

ConstitutionNet’s analysis adds the surrounding party-state and coercive provisions. It identifies Article 6 as redefining Nicaragua as a “revolutionary state,” Article 13 as elevating the Sandinista flag to equal status with the national flag, Article 92-ter as creating Patriotic Reserve Military Forces, and Article 97 as creating a voluntary police force.[4] These provisions do not all perform the same legal task, and they should not be flattened into a generic list of authoritarian features. Some redefine state identity. Some fuse party symbolism with national symbolism. Some add security formations adjacent to ordinary institutions.

Article 17 is the most directly relevant to political membership. ConstitutionNet describes it as legalizing deprivation of nationality for “traitors.”[4] Freedom House reports that at least 317 political prisoners had been denationalized in Nicaragua, a coercive background that gives the citizenship clause immediate electoral significance.[5] A polity can hold a formal vote while simultaneously making opponents legally removable from the polity. That is not a minor administrative power; it changes who can stand inside the constitutional community and claim rights against the state.

Freedom House’s 2025 country report also places the reform in a setting where political rights and civil liberties were already severely constrained.[5] ACLED’s analysis likewise treats Ortega’s Nicaragua as a political environment in which the door to political change had been closed through repression and control, not merely through textual amendment.[6] Those materials are important background, but they do not replace the constitutional analysis. The coercive environment explains why the rewritten text could operate with so little institutional resistance. The text explains how that coercion was given a durable legal form.

Why July 2026 was legally continuous with January 2025

When Ortega said “never again” for elections in July 2026, the announcement landed inside a system that had already removed the constitutional predicates for electoral democracy.[1] The presidency coordinated the branches that would otherwise check the move. The executive controlled appointments to the court and electoral council. The co-presidency had been constitutionalized. The constitutional bridge to international human rights instruments had been removed. Party-state fusion, revolutionary-state language, citizenship stripping, and new security formations reinforced the same direction.

That does not make the cancellation legitimate in any democratic sense. It means the legal category is more precise than “Ortega abolished elections by decree.” The 2025 reform made the abolition formally available within the redesigned constitutional order. By the time the public announcement arrived, the institutions that would have made elections meaningful had already been subordinated, repurposed, or deprived of their strongest constitutional tools.

The remaining uncertainty is the implementing mechanism. Reuters reported Ortega’s statement about working with the National Assembly on laws “building a wall,” but the specific post-announcement legislation was not identified in the available sources.[1] That gap should not be filled with speculation. The firmer conclusion is narrower and more important: the cancellation was formally enabled by the January 2025 constitutional reform, especially the Article 193 amendment route, Article 132’s executive coordination of state branches, Article 136’s appointment structure, and the removal of Article 46’s domestic human-rights bridge.

References

1. Nicaragua's Ortega says 'never again' for elections, Reuters, July 20, 2026.
2. From Democracy to Dynastic Rule? The 2025 Constitutional Reform in Nicaragua, Verfassungsblog, February 2025.
3. Nicaragua legislature ratifies constitutional reforms granting president control over all state branches, JURIST, February 2025.
4. Nicaragua: A New Absolutist Constitution Tailor-Made for an Authoritarian Couple, ConstitutionNet.
5. Freedom in the World 2025 Country Report: Nicaragua, Freedom House.
6. Has Ortega closed the door on political change in Nicaragua?, ACLED.